Remember the ill-fated Tegra 4i? It was Nvidia's first crack at a smartphone SoC with an integrated LTE modem. It's dead, but French phonemaker Wiko did not get the memo.

When it was announced, the design looked promising. Although it was based on the venerable Cortex-A9 core, it featured a relatively powerful GPU for the time, integrated LTE and the chip was supposed to end up on the cheap side.

Too late to matter

However, by the time it was ready, the mid-range smartphone market was already commoditised and MediaTek was making a killing.

The Tegra 4i got a couple of design wins before it became the weird uncle nobody liked to talk about. It then became the equivalent of Kim Jong-Un's uncle. Earlier this year we concluded the chip would not be replaced by a new LTE-enabled smartphone SoC. A few months later Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said the chip simply did not "pan out" and no longer fit the company's new direction.

The new Wiko Highway smartphone is probably the last Tegra 4i phone to launch, if not the last Tegra phone.

Probably the end of the road for Tegra phones

The Wiko Highway actually features a decent spec - it has a 2GHz Tegra 4i, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, but there's no microSD slot. The phone sports a 5-inch 1080p display and a 16-megapixel camera, along with an oversized 8-megaphixel camera at the front.

That's not too shabby for a mid-range device, but the Highway is priced at €300 off-contract, which makes it rather pricey. The phone was announced a few weeks ago and finally seems to be shipping in select European markets, although it looks like a carrier device rather than a model designed for retail.

Just a couple of years ago Nvidia managed to score LG and HTC design wins with the Tegra 3, which also ended up in scores of tablets such as the Nexus 7 2012. As for the future of Nvidia phones, there is always a chance the company will try to get back into the game sometime in the future, but for the time being Tegra focus is on tablets, automotive and a few other niches.

It turns out that Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told investors that when it comes to future Tegra products, Nvidia is going after higher-end devices where visual computing and graphics performance play a major role.

This is a course change for the company. Nvidia tried to enter a new market with the Tegra 4i, which targets mainstream devices such as $199 smartphones. Tegra 4i is finally out and it has two design wins so far, the LG G2 Mini in Latin America and the Wiko Wax in Europe.

Tegra 4i does not fit into Nvidia's high-end focus

We asked Deepu Talla, the GM of Nvidia's Tegra business unit about the potential successor to the fledgling Tegra 4i and the only answer we got was that Nvidia told to its investors that it wants to go after the high-end. It is starting to look like there won’t be a successor at all, but Nvidia is not saying anything. It is worth noting that the Tegra 4i was officially launched in February 2013, thirteen months ago, and we have yet to hear a single remotely credible rumour about its potential successor, let alone anything official.

The mainstream SoC market is getting really crowded and if you plan to enter it you have to learn to live with very tight margins. That is the only way to compete with MediaTek, Qualcomm, Rockchip and other players in this hotly contested segment.

In all likelihood, this strategic shift means that this is the end of the road for Tegra chips with an "i" suffix. What's more, Nvidia does not have a vast product portfolio like Qualcomm or MediaTek, so it can't just cook up a new SoC using off-the-shelf components.

Nvidia's core conundrum

Nvidia currently produces Tegra chips based on ARM's Cortex A9r4 and A15 cores. In a few months it will add Denver 64-bit cores to the mix, but none of them really work for a hypothetical Tegra 5i. The A15s are still too big for mainstream products, a Denver dual-core does not make much sense, either. The A9r4 is already outdated and ARM is replacing it with the Cortex A12 and Cortex A17.

In essence Nvidia would practically have to license one of these new cores for a single product, while the product itself would launch months after MediaTek and the rest of the competition introduce their first A12- and A17-based parts. ARM does not have any 64-bit mainstream parts yet, at least not officially, and neither the Cortex A53 nor Cortex A57 would be a good fit for such a chip. Nvidia never dabbled in Big.LITTLE, nor does it produce compatible cores at the moment. Only the A15 supports big.LITTLE, Denver and the venerable A9r4 do not.

No word on future LTE integration yet

We don’t think that the Tegra K1 64-bit Denver chip is a mainstream product by any stretch of the imagination. We do not expect it to get an on-die modem at one point, either. Maybe that is the future, but not won't happen in the K1 generation, although Nvidia declines to comment.

Based on information that we gathered from many people we met at GTC 2014, it is highly unlikely that we will be seeing a successor to the LTE-loving Tegra 4i and Nvidia also declined to comment on possible plans to include an LTE modem on upcoming big SoC designs, such as the Erista chip, scheduled for 2015.

Nvidia's Tegra 4i is finally out and according to Italian mobile site cellulari.it, the Wiko Wax should hit European retail at €200 next month.

The Tegra 4i is a mid-range part with four Cortex A9r4 cores clocked at 1.7GHz. It has 60 GPU cores (ULP) and it happens to be Nvidia's first SoC with an on-die LTE modem. It looks like a nice mid-range part, but so far there aren't that many design wins to talk about. The Wiko Wax is the first and so far the only device based on Nvidia's new chipset.

While many critics will undoubtedly pounce on this fact, it should be noted that the Wax looks like a decent phone to say the least. Wiko is a French company and the French happen to know a thing or two about design, so the phone looks quite nice.

It has a 4.7-inch 720p display, 8-megapixel camera backed by a 5-megapixel front facing camera. It has 1GB of RAM, but only 4GB of on board storage. Luckily there's a microSD slot for expansion. All in all it looks like a good deal for €200. That sort of money will buy you a Galaxy S3 mini, a Huawei G610 or a Moto G. Although we've huge fans of the latter, none of them come close to the Wiko Wax in terms of specs and sheer power. None of them has LTE, either.

We don't have any info on any new Tegra 4i design wins and at this point it does not appear to be going all that well for Nvidia's first LTE SoC. However, it's still too early to pass judgment, we might see more design wins over the next few weeks.

While the only connection to the flagship LG G2 is its name and the buttons on the back, the LG G2 mini still looks quite good and will most likely end up like a choice of many budget smartphone buyers, mostly thanks to its affordability and neat design. We stopped by LG's booth to check out the little thing and we must note it is kinda cute, feels quite sturdy and it is definitely feels good in hand.

Based around a 4.7-inch qHD 960x540 screen and running on Android 4.4 KitKat with a dash of LG's Optimus UI, the LG G2 mini is years behind the LG G2 smartphone but it should be snappy with its Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 or Nvidia Tegra 4i SoC, depending on the region. The rest of the features include 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage expandable via microSD card, 2440mAh battery, a 13- or 8-megapixel rear camera with flash and volume and lock buttons placed below the camera, just like on the bigger LG G2.

Although we would certainly like to see a 720p panel squeezed inside the LG G2 mini, which should put it against the Moto G, it appears that budget is still sticking to qHD 540p.

The LG G2 mini should be available in black, white, red and gold color choices and start to roll out sometime in March or April, again depending on the region.

After a year in the making, Nvidia’s first LTE phone based on A9 quad-core powered Tegra 4i chip is finally out. It is not an A series brand as the phone comes from French company called Wiko.

We could not benchmark it but representatives told us that it will come a bit later, without a precise shipping date. Our best information is that this phone should start shipping in Q2 2014 at the earliest.

This 720p phone with an 8-megapixel camera is very light, it has a changeable back cover and it is a very thin design. Someone close to Nvidia suggested that phones like Wiko’s Wax should sell for around 200 euro and if subsidized probably for free, but we didn’t get official confirmation on that.

The phone will be known under the WAX brand and we saw it loading webpages over 4G implying that it works as it was supposed to.

Jumping the gun ahead of the Mobile World Congress 2014 which kicks off in Barcelona on 24th of February, LG Netherlands has now officially unveiled the earlier rumored LG G2 mini smartphone which is designed around a 4.7-inch screen and powered by either a Snapdragon 400 or Nvidia Tegra 4i, depending on the version.

Both versions have a 1.2GHz clocked quad-core CPU, albeit slightly different, 1GB of RAM and apparently LG will also have a dual-SIM and non-LTE versions as well. The entire smartphone is designed around a 4.7-inch qHD 960x540 resolution screen and will run on Android 4.4 Kitkat with LG's own Optimus UI on top of it.

As you can see from the picture below, LG took some features from the bigger LG G2, including the back position buttons placed below an 8-megapixel rear camera. It will have 8GB of internal storage expendable via microSD card slot and a 2,440mAh battery.

According to reports, LG G2 mini should start to roll out in March in Russia while rest of the regions should get in April. It will be available in black, white red and gold color choices.

As we said many times before, in the smartphone, tablet or notebook market it is all about the product cycle. You need to be able to deliver your chip and rest of the platform on time, so OEMs can create the products around your chip.

The design and manufacturing process of a smartphone phone takes up to two years and as you could see with Nvidia’s Tegra 4, the two quarter delay pretty much destroyed the sales of this chip and put this business unit on its knees. In 2014 Nvidia could not let this happen and the outlook is a bit better at this time. The recovery, according to CEO Jen-Hsun Haung, starts in late Q1 2014 when the company starts shipping some of its new chips.

We expect to see high performance tablets, set-top and gaming boxes (essentially Android PCs), Tegra T4i in some mainstream phones and of course Tegra parts in car infotainment systems.

Companies start shipping chips at least a quarter before we see the actual products shipping and with late Q1 2014 as shipping date for some chips, we can expect to see announcements in Q2. Jensen claims that the near term catalyst growth for Nvidia starts in late Q1 but happens mostly in Q2 and mostly in Q3 2014. This is in line with what we were expecting all along. Like we said back in August, much of 2013 and the first quarter of 2014 were (very) bad for Nvidia’t Tegra division.

From some preliminary Tegra K1 benchmarks revealed at CES 2014 it is obvious that the chip looks faster than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805 powered by Adreno 420, but it is still too early to announce any winners.

Traditionally Nvidia did well in tablets, while Qualcomm always did great in phones thanks to LTE support. In 2013 Qualcomm swiped the most significant tablet wins as well as virtually all significant high-end phones with LTE, except Apple and Samsung flagships based on in-house parts.

Nvidia went on the record after its fiscal Q4 2014 conference call and has confirmed that T4i based devices should appear by early Q2 at the latest. Nvidia expects that partners will have LTE capable Tegra 4i devices in late Q1 2014, if not early Q2 2014, so March to April sounds like a decent time to announce the first devices. We have heard that there will be a lot of design wins in this mainstream LTE capable SoC market for Nvidia. Apart from Qualcomm, there is not much choice if you want an LTE capable device and MediaTek parts are still a couple of months away.

Nvidia also expects that Tegra 4i and other new products can help boost revenues in the long run. This is likely to happen simply as Tegra K1 should be shipping in devices at some point in Q2 2014. This timeframe is what our sources have confirmed, not Nvidia. Nvidia’s CEO simply tells investors that "Tegra K1 will, as Chris mentioned earlier, start to ramp in the first half and it will ramp further in the second half. So that’s one growth catalyst." Chris Evenden is the new senior director of investor relations at Nvidia, a chap that we met more than 10 years ago.

Last but not least, Nvidia should have an even more powerful Tegra flavour coming in 2H 2014, with the new Denver 64-bit CPU core. According to Nvidia's CEO Jen Hsun Huang "Denver is likely to be the most advanced 64-bit ARM processor in the world." It’s a tough prediction to make, as it's hard to know what Apple has in workshop for its next generation chip.

As we mentioned here, it is not all rosy in Tegra garden as Tegra revenue is down 37 percent, largely because of lost design wins. Tegra 4 was simply too late. It was delayed by more than two quarters and was too late for most manufacturer to create any mind blowing devices based on it. Tegra 4i and Tegra K1 should increase Tegra revenues in 2014, at least that’s how things seem at this point.

“Nvidia doesn’t and hasn’t ever addressed the bottom 70% of the market, right. For a lot of applications, if you are doing e-mail, browsing, those kinds of things, using the integrated graphics that comes inside of your notebook or your PC is just fine,” he said.

The same philosophy applies to Tegra. The low-end and mid-range space is much more competitive, so Nvidia doesn’t want to take on the likes of Mediatek and Qualcomm.

“Our strategy with Tegra is the same as it is with our GPU business. Within the GPU business, we do not target 100 percent of the PC market. As I mentioned earlier, 70 percent of the PC market does not need an Nvidia GPU. What we do is we target PCs where visual computing matters,” he said. “Our strategy with Tegra is exactly the same. We target segments of the Android market where visual computing matters and we don’t address a majority of the market, because it doesn’t matter for a lot of that market.”

Csongor admitted that Nvidia was late with Tegra 4, but he stressed that it will not be late with the next generation part. He expects to see growth in the Tegra business through 2014, starting this quarter. Csongor added that the Android market is diversifying, with new form factors including AIO PCs, clamshells, set-top boxes and car infotainment systems.

Nvidia is focusing on every market where visual computing matters, from high-resolution tablets, through infotainment systems to smartphones designed with an emphasis on GPU performance. Nvidia can’t and won’t target high-volume markets.

Tegra 5 is expected to feature a vastly superior GPU that could finally give Nvidia a competitive edge in the SoC space, hence the approach won’t change anytime soon. Meanwhile the Tegra 4i packs the most powerful GPU of any mid-range part out there, coupled with four cheap A9r4 CPU cores.

You can check out the full transcript of the analyst call over at Seeking Alpha.

One of the tougher aspects of handheld chip design is to get the certification for US network carriers such as AT&T and Verizon.

Despite the fact that Nvidia showed Tegra 4i back in February it just recently got the AT&T certification and validation of its LTE modem. Qualcomm is already certified for Advanced LTE and theoretical speeds of 150 Mbits per second and Nvidia should be ready for Advanced LTE too.

Nvidia's i500 icera modem also got certification for AT&T and this was confirmed by Jensen Huang Nvidia CEO during the company’s last earnings call. The way things are moving we should see devices based on Nvidia icera i500 modems and Tegra 4i showcased and announced already at CES 2014 as traditional US carriers chose to show these new devices at CES. At the Barcelona based Mobile World Congress in late February we expect to see European and international design wins based on mainstream Tegra 4i, icera i500 and Tegra 5 as well.

Tegra 5, currently codenamed Logan, from what we know comes in January with designs to happen in Q1 2014. We don’t know if Nvidia can get Verizon certification anytime soon as if Nvidia had it by now, they would surely be bragging about it.